fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5714 ]

[ SECRET POST #5714 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5714 ⌋

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We all know school meals in the 90s and 00s were hellish, and that lately school meals have gotten so much better, but what were they like in the 80s? What would the average US School Meal have been like in the early-mid 80s?

Ooh, that question takes me back. I'm old enough to have eaten school lunches during that era, but because I'm that old I can't remember all the details. I took a packed lunch most days, too. But my faves:

* spaghetti in meat sauce with Texas toast: pasta that was definitely past al dente with a basic ground beef sauce, thick fluffy slices of white bread with neon-yellow margarine (at least, I assume it wasn't really butter) and the vegetable was usually iceberg lettuce salad with some bits of carrot and purple cabbage.

* pizza: flat rectangle of very soft crust, sauce and cheese. There's a cooking fad going around where people try to replicate this and I tried to Google an appropriate one but... honestly, they all look better than what I had, LOL. But I still loved it because it was pizza and I wasn't a picky eater when it came to pizza.

* tacos: hard shell tacos with ground beef that was mostly seasoned with salt and pepper and not much else, shredded American cheese, shredded lettuce, diced tomato. No salsa because flavor was a threatening concept for school kids, I guess!

Vegetables were kind of an afterthought, technically there but not very appetizing. Green beans were very soft and slightly oily, came from a can. Canned corn, which I actually liked but isn't all that nutritionally sound. Then the previously mentioned iceberg lettuce salad. I think there might've been a green bean/carrot/lima bean mix but I hated that and never ate it. Portions were very small, like 1/3 cup or less. Probably because they knew most kids wouldn't eat it.

NAYRT but this is so fun to read lol. Very interesting. Only school I ever stayed at for lunch was grades 5 to 8 and I am pretty sure we had packed lunches so I don't even know what the school served, except for the little baggies of chocolate milk because my mom would give me 50c occasionally to get one.

Ahh, school milk! IIRC it cost .35 for a small carton when I was a little kid and even when I brought a packaged lunch, my mom would give me milk money in my coin purse. The milk lady was stationed at a table just outside the cafeteria, so you'd hand her the money and choose white or chocolate milk. I'd sneakily buy the chocolate because I wasn't allowed chocolate milk at home. :)

Biggest reason I couldn't wait to get to junior high and high school was access to salad bar. One of the high schools I went to had chicken sandwich baskets and pasta and potato bars. The kids who have to endure that "healthy" shit post-1990s really missed out.

We had similar lunches in elementary school in the 80s. Sometimes there were french fries, but they were clearly the frozen kind that you baked and also usually underdone. A lot of the food for school lunches was government surplus, so canned veg, canned peanut butter and processed cheese tended to feature regularly. Lasagna was basically overcooked lasagna noodles layered with the same "meat sauce" they put on the spaghetti. Desserts tended toward pudding, jello or fruit cocktail.

That was my experience exactly. I can't believe I forgot about the undercooked french fries, geez. I also never really enjoyed fruit cocktail, the texture was too slippery for my taste.

Absolutely this. I brought a bag lunch or when I had a free period adjacent to lunch we’d go to Little Caesars down the road. We had open campuses.

Your school must've been in contact with mine or something, 'cause that pretty much sums up my school lunch menus, too :p.

Did you also have tater tots? 'Cause we had those at my school. We also had these burritos with cheese on top of the shell, but they didn't call them burritos, they called them something else, something with a "c". I'm blanking on what the name was, though.

Enchiladas?

AYRT

Sort of, yeah, but not quite the same thing.

Ugh, trying to think of the term they used for them is going to bug me now. It's on the tip of my tongue.

DA

Chimichangas?

Team chili, cinnamon rolls and carrots.

The idea of having an actual cafeteria and actual school lunches is so fascinating to me, because my school just had a commons. It was a big open space with a few tables, and technically you could eat there, but nobody did. It also had a concession, with some staples (chips, candy, fruit, bagels, cup-a-soup, nachos and cheese) as well as whatever the daily special was (pizza, cheese burgers, chicken burgers, etc.) The hot food was actually pretty yummy, but it wasn't very healthy and it wasn't that cheap, so most of us only got it as a treat.

I think even horrible cafeteria lunches would've been better than my packed lunches (we were fairly poor and my mother is notoriously cheap), but maybe not much better.

This was more my experience in high school, but that would've been more early 90s. Very few people ate cafeteria food, though I think they had a regular menu? I never did. My high school allowed juniors and seniors to leave the school grounds for lunch, so a lot of students did that.

I didn't start school until the mid-80s, but I would trade my fresh ground peanut butter and organic local honey sandwich on whole wheat bread (hippie parents) for fries or tater tots when I could get them, because I wasn't allowed them at home, and I remember a lot of fried potatoes, ketchup, ground beef, American cheese, tomato sauce, and mushy vegetables. Also low fat chocolate milk, mealy red ~~delicious~~ disgusting apples, and brown spotted bananas.

My parents weren't well off, but at least we ate a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. They grew up in the era of boiling everything to death and/or opening a can of mushy khaki green beans, and honestly cafeteria food seemed like it was still stuck there.

"delicious" apples are a prime example of false advertising. That's all I have to add to this thread because I didn't go to elementary, junior high or high school in the 80's

My elementary school actually had pretty good food in the '90s. The cafeteria ladies actually cooked instead of reheating stuff and it was all really good, especially a chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy dish that I still dream about sometimes. Food started sucking ass in the '00s when they stopped cooking food in the cafeteria and started giving us milk in bags instead of cartons.

I was in elementary school in the 80s, but I never ate school lunches. I either brought my lunch or went home for lunch (it was a small town). I was the pickiest of picky-eaters and if I didn't like what was available, I just did not eat. I tended to avoid the cafeteria, too - it always smelled. But I do remember other students always having milk cartons and having tater tots pretty often.

But I got curious what I could find in the way of school lunch menus from the 80s.

Here's a California newspaper article with school lunches for the coming week from April 1983:
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=WSN19840411.2.11&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

Here's some Dover High (Ohio) school lunches:
https://doverohclassof1984.org/Main/Academics/Classes/Lunchtime/Menus/Menus.html

I don't remember my 80s school meals at all! I mostly just remember the process of standing in line, getting a carton of milk out of a big chest fridge thing when I got to it, going before a woman with a big book who would make a mark next to my name, then I'd go stand in another line to pick up a tray of food. The trays would be completely filled already, none of this go down the line letting different cafeteria workers dish things out on my tray one thing at a time.

The food itself was unmemorable, I guess.

I started elementary school in the mid '80s. To the best of my recollection, we'd typically get a lunch tray with a main dish, small vegetable side dish, small fruit side dish, and milk (choice of plain, chocolate, and strawberry). I also remember getting dessert, but maybe not with every school lunch?

The fruit side dish was usually from a can. I remember eating fruit cocktail, applesauce, and (less frequently) canned mandarin oranges. I think sometimes they gave us fresh oranges cut into wedges?

Vegetable side dishes included tater tots, mashed potatoes, canned green beans, corn (can't recall if it was canned or frozen), broccoli, and a zucchini and summer squash mix.

Main dishes I remember:
* hamburger on a bun (which they always listed as "beefburger" on the menu so that Jewish kids wouldn't get confused about what meat was involved)
* French toast sticks
* either pancakes or waffles, can't remember which (or maybe it was both at different times)
* tacos
* enchiladas
* pork roll (a disk of rubbery meat on a Kaiser roll)
* lasagna (choice of meat or cheese most times; occasionally vegetable lasagna containing zucchini and carrots iirc)
* Philly cheesesteak
* meatball sub
* hoagie (lunch meat, cheese, iceberg lettuce, and tomato on Italian bread)
* the abovementioned rectangular pizza
* (during Thanksgiving week) turkey with gravy

Desserts were most often jello with a squirt of reddi whip, pudding (choice of chocolate or vanilla), and a square of cake (don't think we were allowed to choose the flavor, but I remember both chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and vanilla cake with vanilla frosting).

If you forgot your lunch money, they'd give you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for free. They were vile, made with grape jelly and a particularly greasy and plasticky peanut butter.

Government surplus peanut butter! It came in giant cans and the oil separated from the solids so it had to be mixed back in and was hard to reincorporate. I always figured they were raising 50s bomb shelters for that stuff.

That totally explains why it was so disgusting! Thanks for the info, anon.

SA

I remembered a few other main dishes:
* chicken patty on a bun
* pencil points (penne pasta with tomato sauce)
* fish sandwich; very possibly fish sticks as well, though I don't recall them specifically (I once asked my mom why the cafeteria served fish so often on Fridays, and she explained it was for the benefit of Catholics who didn't eat meat then. Though I'm not actually sure if my school had any students with that dietary restriction in the years I was there, especially since there was a Catholic school just up the road that the more religious families could send their kids to.)

And on pasta or pizza days, we got garlic bread and salad as sides.

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[ SECRET POST #5714 ]

Lets talk school meals.

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